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Today (July 27, 2017) is the 49th Anniversary of the delivery of the first four British Aircraft Corporation (now British Aerospace) Eagle Mk. I (known during its development as TSR.2) to the RAF operational unit. One year later, the US-licensed version, the A-8A Marauder II, built by a joint venture of Lockheed and the Martin Company, began deliveries to the USAF. Today, the original TSR.2 design has been substantially updated, what with the newest GE F101 engine, modern radar, an improved intake design and a larger wing (adopted after the first production models) for better low speed and high altitude performance, and is still being built now to replace older Eagle and A-8 airplanes. The current version is the British Aerospace Eagle GSR.7 and the Lockheed Martin A-8F Marauder III.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened had the General Dynamics F-111 not suffered two horrible crashes early in the flight test program. First, the plane was notoriously prone to compressor stalls, what with the poor engine intake design and the Pratt & Whitney TF30 engine also being prone to compressor stalls. As a result, the first YF-111A prototype was lost when the crew tried to restart the engine from a low-altitude compressor stall. Seocnd, the third YF-111A prototype was lost when the right horizontal tailplane broke off during an attempted steep climb from low altitude. Finally, they had really serious problems developing the avionics for the plane. No wonder why the USAF pulled the plug on the F-111 project in August 1966. Like what happened in the early 1950's when the Martin XB-51 failed to live up to expectations and USAF decided to buy the license built version of the English Electric Canberra instead, USAF in 1966 chose again to license a British design--the TSR.2--as its primary interdiction platform, built by the Lockheed/Martin Company joint venture I mentioned above.

The more I think about it, had the F-111 been developed correctly, it would have carried a pretty large bomb load, had a pretty large internal fuel load for long range (though with a reduced bomb load), and variable-geometry wings would allow for operations out of fairly short runways.

The F-111 may have been a failure for General Dynamics, but what they learned from that project proved vital in that company winning the Lightweight Fighter (LWF) project with the F-16 Fighting Falcon. It did help General Dynamics was building a lot of new submarines for the US Navy at its Electric Boat division in the second half of the 1960's, so the financial impact on the company was relatively low. And Grumman Aerospace--who developed the variable geometry wing system for the F-111 (that was the part of the F-111 that actually worked well)--used its experience to eventually build the F-14 Tomcat jet fighter for the US Navy.
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